With his dark business suit, short salt-and-pepper hair, and serious mien, suspended Boston police Officer Roberto Pulido looked like a model citizen yesterday in the federal courthouse.
But the Pulido who emerged in surveillance photographs shown in court and in about two dozen secretly recorded conversations played for jurors could have been an extravagant Hollywood version of a street gangster.
In a photograph taken with a hidden camera in May 2006 at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, Pulido embraces a 300-pound FBI agent posing as a drug dealer moments after Pulido allegedly received $15,000 in $100 bills for protecting a shipment of cocaine that arrived in Boston the week before.
The softball-sized wad of cash bulges in Pulido's pants pocket.
In phone conversations that he salted liberally with profanity and street slang, Pulido discusses the finer points of injecting steroids that he peddles, boasts about getting an acquaintance to break into a man's house to steal $40,000, and upbraids a fellow officer who responds too slowly to his invitation to escort 100 kilograms of cocaine from New York to Boston.
"I got a business proposition, and you know I can't be waiting around," he tells Carlos Pizarro after Pizarro asks why Pulido sounds testy. "I got people waiting for me. I got people waiting for answers."
Pulido's lawyer, Rudolph F. Miller, said after court that the tapes and pictures give a distorted picture of his client.
"He's a multifaceted individual, for sure," Miller said. "However, the glimpses we're seeing of him in the tapes are not the Roberto Pulido we know. That's just one glimpse, and it doesn't portray an accurate picture of Roberto Pulido. The story has yet to be told."
Pulido, Pizarro, and a third Boston police officer, Nelson Carrasquillo, were arrested in Miami in July 2006 after they allegedly protected truckloads of cocaine that were shipped to Boston in an FBI sting operation. They received tens of thousands of dollars for their services, according to prosecutors.
Pizarro and Carrasquillo have pleaded guilty to drug-trafficking charges. But Pulido, the alleged ringleader, went to trial this week in what some have described as Boston's ugliest police corruption scandal in a decade. He sat quietly at the defense table with his legal team and occasionally glanced at relatives and supporters in the gallery.
Miller told the 16 jurors in his opening statement that his client was no drug dealer and that the FBI engineered the entire scheme, relying on an informant who was a scoundrel.
But Pulido does not come across well on the recordings and in the photographs presented by Assistant US Attorney John T. McNeil. He appears to relish his persona as a tough-talking hustler who allegedly buys and peddles fraudulently obtained store gift cards, sells Social Security numbers of motorists he has stopped, bad-mouths his wife, deals steroids mailed to him from Greece, and provides police escorts for cocaine shipments.
In one conversation, he promises to party with Florida drug dealers who are really undercover FBI agents after they deliver 40 kilograms of cocaine to his garage in Jamaica Plain. After the delivery, he goes to Atlantic City and hugs an agent he thought was a drug dealer called Big Manny upon receiving the $15,000. He had already received $5,000, according to an FBI agent, Kevin Constantine, who spent a second day on the witness stand describing the sting.
In another conversation last year, he promises a Boston police officer, Edgardo Rodriguez, that "your stuff" - a shipment of steroids - will be arriving shortly. When Rodriquez says people at his gym told him to inject the drugs into his buttocks, Pulido disagrees and says the drug is water-based and will not be effective if injected there.
"Nah, bro, you put it in your upper body," Pulido said. "Every book I've ever read and everything I've said is it's always in the shoulder, biceps, triceps, in your thighs, not back there."
Rodriguez was later indicted on federal charges in connection with the investigation and has been suspended without pay, according to Elaine Driscoll, a Boston police spokeswoman.
Pulido is also heard in another phone call allegedly telling a former Boston police officer, Noel Docanto, that a shipment of steroids has arrived. Pulido says he is storing the drugs at his girlfriend's house and uses an expletive to describe his wife.
"You know how it is," he tells Docanto, and they both laugh.
Docanto was fired in 2005 for assaulting a civilian and concealing his identity as an officer, Driscoll said.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com
